In 1958, David Wilkerson went to New York City to minister to teenagers caught up in the street gangs. In 1963, he wrote a best-selling book about his experiences called The Cross and the Switchblade. In 1968, one of the most prominent teens who converted to Christianity under Wilkerson’s ministry, Nicky Cruz, wrote his own life story in a book called Run Baby Run. In 1970, actor Don Murray directed a movie version of The Cross and the Switchblade, starring... Read more

Here are the figures for the past weekend, arranged from those that owe the highest percentage of their take to the Canadian box office to those that owe the lowest. 21 — CDN $7,670,000 — N.AM $69,984,000 — 11.0%Smart People — CDN $673,485 — N.AM $6,818,000 — 9.9%88 Minutes — CDN $605,771 — N.AM $6,800,000 — 8.9%Street Kings — CDN $1,750,000 — N.AM $19,879,000 — 8.8%The Forbidden Kingdom — CDN $1,770,000 — N.AM $20,870,000 — 8.5%Forgetting Sarah Marshall — CDN... Read more

Looks like we can ignore that rumour about Terminator 4 being cancelled at the last minute. Tonight the Hollywood Reporter, via Reuters, passed on the news that Moon Bloodgood is on the verge of being hired to play the female lead in the film, which starts shooting May 5: Bloodgood will play a no-nonsense and battle-hardened member of the resistance who is carrying a lot of guilt over surviving the nuclear holocaust. Bloodgood has done a fair bit of TV... Read more

Entertanment Weekly recently did a joint interview with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, in anticipation of next month’s release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and along the way Lucas offered this interesting description of one of the franchise’s basic operating principles: LUCAS: The supernatural part has to be real. [He taps the table] Which is why they’re very hard, and you run out [of options] very fast. You have to have a supernatural object that... Read more

Blogging has been extremely light lately, thanks to a bout of food poisoning and the need to catch up on work afterwards. Here are a few news items that came along in that time. 1. The Hollywood Reporter says Universal and Imagine are planning a remake of The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). That’s reason enough to be concerned. It also says the director attached to the project is Brett Ratner. That’s scary. It also says the actor attached to the... Read more

Just a note to say I have now posted the full unexpurgated version of my interview with Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed star and co-writer Ben Stein, here. I’ll have some comments on the film itself at some point, but since the film does not yet have a Canadian release date, I don’t know when or where they will be. Read more

My review of The Forbidden Kingdom is now up at CT Movies. Read more

Click here if the video file above doesn’t play properly. In related news, people like Anne Thompson have been hearing very good things about Iron Man, now that it has screened for exhibitors; meanwhile, Nikki Finke spells out various reasons why some people should keep their box-office expectations low-ish. Read more

A few months ago, I spoke for about an hour to Eric Kohn, a writer for Heeb magazine, about Christian films and Christian perceptions of Hollywood (including the perception some have that it is “controlled by secular Jews”, to quote one particularly outspoken activist). About four sentences from our chat are quoted in the article, which is now online — and that seems about par for the course — but I recognize much of our conservation in the various other... Read more